Question

Those words were spoken by Frederick Douglass in a speech in 1886, but they express a sentiment that could relate to most of the early nineteenth-century reform movements. Choose one of these reform movements and explain how Douglass’s statement applies to that movement. Include specific details about the reform movement’s origins, goals, obstacles, and advocates.

Answer 1

Women's rights

Until the nineteenth century, the role of women was largely confined to home, monastic seclusion, or worldly feasts, despite the eruption of figures in the French courts, in their learned halls such as Madame Pompadour, for example, or later, Emmanuelle Sand, or Marquesa de Alorna, in Portugal.

Access to higher education was another battle of women in the twentieth century, as was access to public and mainly management positions.

Throughout the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, various measures were taken with regard to the protection of women's rights. One was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the United Nations in 1979, as inequalities continued after the institutionalization of human rights.